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Wyldwood Bayou grid will celebrate first anniversary from Friday, October 29 through Monday, November 1, which coincides with the grid’s second Halloween Bash to be held on Sunday, October 31. The grid was launched a year ago by Kith Whitehawk as a destination grid for the club Rockin’ the Blues, andRead More →

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More than 300 valid responses came in for the Twelfth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey, and Wildwood Bayou received nearly perfect scores in all categories, with Utopia Skye, Enchanted Grid, Craft World and Kitely close behind. Wildwood Bayou, Utopia Skye, and Enchanted Grid were all write-in grids. Most years, there’s at leastRead More →

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AviTron, is testing out cryptocurrency as an in-world payment method in addition to its in-world currency, Tron. The grid will be accepting Bitcoin and Dogecoin as payment for land rentals and in-world purchases, despite the fact that the currencies are highly volatile and pose regulatory and other hazards for grids.Read More →

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AvaCon is delighted to announce the ninth annual OpenSimulator Community Conference 2021 to take place virtually on the OpenSimulator Conference Center grid on December 11 and 12, 2021. The OpenSimulator Community Conference is an annual conference that focuses on the developer and user community surrounding the OpenSimulator software. Join us and showcaseRead More →

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All OpenSim stats were up this month. Despite Tag grid not reporting its user numbers, OpenSim actives were up by 107, while land area increased by the equivalent of 673 standard regions. In addition, OpenSim’s public grids registered 875 new users. Most of the regions added this month are hypergridabble,Read More →

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After AviTron reported Gloebit payment problems on Saturday, other grids also seem to be having the same issue. Today, Gloebit confirmed that there’s an issue. “It appears that starting Sep. 27, some grids had some notifications of completion of transaction not make it back to the grid,” Gloebit CEO ChrisRead More →

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  The AviTron grid is reporting an outage in the multi-grid Gloebit payment system. “I have been emailing these guys for two weeks now,” AviTron grid owner Alex Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “No response yet.” According to Pomposelli, the problem is that the Gloebit DLL needs to be updated. TheRead More →

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OpenSim added more than 1,300 active users this month, after a drop of nearly 5,000 last month. Public grids also registered 2,670 new user accounts. Land area slipped slightly — by 507 regions, but nothing like last month’s drop of 4,361. The drop in area was fully accounted for, andRead More →

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StoryLink Radio, a group of Irish storytellers at Seanchaí Library, will host a series of Halloween events on Kitely and Second Life next month. There will be live in-world storytelling sessions and hunts from 7 p.m. Pacific Time every Thursday, Friday, Sunday, and most Tuesdays from 1 October to 30 October,Read More →

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Russia-based OpenSim company Caprica is now hosting private grids starting at just $20 a month. The company also runs its own grid, also called Caprica, That grid, which was founded in early 2018, currently has 310 regions and reported 300 active users in the last 30 days. Caprica’s new privateRead More →

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Birdland, an illuminated novel by Luciwa Peregrine, premieres tomorrow, Sunday, Aug. 29, at the Nuna Gallery on 3rd Rock Grid. The hypergrid address is grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002:The Nuna Gallery. The opening is at 11 a.m. Pacific time, and then the book will be a temporary exhibit at the gallery for people toRead More →

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OpenSim lost both land area and active users this month. Part of it is seasonal, with schools out of session, and people going outside to enjoy the nice weather. Part of the loss is because The Tag Grid, which reported nearly 1,700 active users last month, did not share thoseRead More →

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OpenSim’s public grids reported an increase in land area this month, continuing an 11-month growth streak. Total area increased by the equivalent of 2,252 standard regions, for a new record high of 103,625 regions. That’s nearly four times the area of Second Life, according to the latest stats from GridSurvey,Read More →

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OSgrid, the largest grid in land area and active user numbers, will celebrate its 14th birthday starting on Monday, July 19. The celebration will run through July 25. And to celebrate its birthday, the grid will give away free parcels in the OSGB14 regions where creators can showcase their bestRead More →

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OpenSim stats went up across the board this month, with the number of regions hitting yet another record high, despite a cleanup on OSgrid that took down more than 1,000 region map reservations. Overall, land area went up by the equivalent of 86 standard regions, for a new high ofRead More →

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Update: Free service still available, but needs integration work. See full story here. Vivox, the voice service acquired by Unity two years ago, is discontinuing its free OpenSim service. “As of May 25, 2021, the Free Virtual World Voice service has been deprecated and we will no longer be acceptingRead More →

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Two grid owners have successfully enabled Podex for hypergrid visitors to their grids. Discovery Grid owner Rene Vega, also known as Balpien Hammerer in-world, and AviWorlds owner Josh Boam have allowed hypergrid visitors to buy and use Podex-based local currencies while visiting their grids. “Thanks to Josh Boam as wellRead More →

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A few OpenSim grid owners have contacted me about price updates, and there have been some dramatic drops out there fueled by improved management tools on the part of the grid owners and lower hosting prices by infrastructure providers. That inspired me to review all the grid prices on theRead More →

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OpenSim’s total land area has crossed the equivalent of 100,000 regions for the first time in history. With the equivalent of 3,504 standard-sized regions added since this time last month, OpenSim’s public grids now report the equivalent of 101,400 regions in land area. We say “equivalent” because many OpenSim grids nowRead More →

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Update 5/19: AnSky is switching away from Gloebit, possibly to a local currency on the jOpenSimMoney module. The Gloebit payment services is back up this week, kind of, after more than a month of downtime, but many grids and users are still reporting issues with the payment system. “We restoredRead More →

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Textures that previously took 15 to 30 seconds to appear now take less than two, due to the March update to the Firestorm viewer. That means that OpenSim builders, creators, and shoppers who use the Firestorm Viewer can pull textures from their inventories, drop them on an object, and immediatelyRead More →

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DigiWorldz, a leading commercial OpenSim grid, is giving away a years’ free rent for 25 regions, each one a two-by-two varregion with 25,000 prims, The drawing is free to enter and its open to both local residents and hypergrid visitors — applicants just need to fill out a form beforeRead More →

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The Fire and Ice grid now has a new better performing server, allowing region owners to offer role play games, racing games, performing arts, and other computationally demanding activities to their visitors. These changes will boost performance of regions by reducing workload, said grid owner Sara Payne, who is alsoRead More →

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Last month, Rec Room — a virtual reality app that lets users build virtual environments and games which they can play virtually with others across mobile and PC platforms — became the latest virtual reality startup to achieve a unicorn status,  which means it reached a $1 billion valuation. ExpertsRead More →

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Littlefield will celebrate its eight year anniversary since it started as a standalone grid on Saturday, April 10 with music and an exhibition of in-world creations. The event starts at 3 p.m. Pacific time on the Anniversary region with a live performance by Terry Wildman, followed by a dance partyRead More →

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Interested in seeing the evolution of metaverse art? The Craft World grid will be hosting an exhibition on Friday, March 19 on the Uqbar region, of photographs and 3D builds from Second Life created between 2006 and 2012. Voxel 1 is only the first event in the Retrospective Exhibition series, saidRead More →

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Microsoft showed off its new “holoportation” technology at its  Microsoft Ignite 2021 Keynote earlier this month. The technology combines avatars and augmented and virtual reality to allow people to virtually “teleport” themselves to meetings. For better immersion in digital worlds, holoportation allows a user to use a full digital 3D versionRead More →

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  Signal Theory has built an immersive and interactive app that lets you take a selfie of yourself on Mars and share it on Instagram. Plus, the app lets you explore the red planet through the eyes of the Perseverance Rover. The app is built using the National Geographic Mars 360Read More →

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Story telling is increasingly blurring the line between the physical and virtual worlds, according to presenters at the just-concluded this year’s  Technology + Storytelling: Engaging The Immersive Future event organized by NYC Media Lab. We’re already seeing this happen on the production sites in series like Disney’s The Mandalorian, as youRead More →

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Podex, the second-largest OpenSim payments provider, has suffered a fire at its data center and services are temporarily down, but no user money has been lost. “The Podex system is on OVH servers based in Strasbourg and fire destroyed some of their data center,” Podex CEO Jacek Shuftan told HypergridRead More →

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Smartphones have radically transformed how we communicate with each other, learn, shop, get the news, get driving directions — they touch nearly every facet of our lives. The transformative effects of smart glasses, also known as augmented reality glasses, can be equally dramatic. Instead of looking down at a screen,Read More →

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Our sister site, the speculative fiction magazine MetaStellar, is accepting original flash fiction stories this month. If you have an original, never-before-published sci-fi, fantasy, or horror story of 1,000 words or less, you can submit it here. Authors whose stories are accepted will be paid 8 cents a word forRead More →